This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I get the sentiment, who doesn’t want to dunk on Google?
But the headline is needlessly inflammatory. There is no law yet; and google essentially is saying please please don’t implement it, it totally doesn’t make sense.
Don’t get me wrong, the EU should still implement it. And once it is law; Google will also comply.
Damn.
Wish the rest of us could just ignore all laws & not face any consequences.
What a fucking joke this entire system is.
They don't have a problem giving someone 100 years for a quarter bag of weed though. For a first time offense.
Oh that was long ago. it's for not having a baby if you're female now. Megacorps run usa and now the worst (which is best for some reason) ceo in the history of man will again be president and continue the clear path to government dismantling
Sovereign citizens are really getting out of hand. Oh wait it's google.
Fine the heck out of them then. If they don't pay the fine ban em. Plenty of alternatives out there. More competition in the search engine market would be better anyways.
Not too big of a fan of banning companies as the hurdles should be decently high... Especially if many people rely on their service but if they won't comply with our jurisdiction long term I see this as the only option as fees can not be order of business to pay
Commence operation “find out”!
Didn't a year ago or so, Some European lawmaker made a vague hint in support of something that involved regulations on social media, and Elon replied "go fuck yourself" verbatem?
Play hardball, or surrender and give them what they want. there's no compromise or middle ground with these techbro fascists
So, another “cookie banner” coming then, but this one says: “facts not checked”
Given that we are going full authoritarian fascist now, perhaps the EU should ban Google, given the US tik tok precedent.
What a twist. In the 90s, the internet forced countries to wake up to the new modern era. It was a combination of American companies wanting both to expand and provide goodwill.
And now, this new era is going to tell American companies to fuck off.
Democracies around the world rightly shouldn't tolerate the blatant corruption and manipulative business practice of American tech companies.
America itself seems fine with it.
Oh wait, you said Democracies right. My bad.
I want to live in a world where the EU bans Google, but we all know the EU will just roll over and accept this.
This is definitely to avoid the ire of fuhrer trump. It's also coincidence that meta is abandoning fact checking right before the new administration
He will sic the dogs of regulation on them if they don't dance to his tune
wish the eu would just actually ban american companies there is really no need for them anyway
Fascism is good for business.
🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
In other words, a company, acting on behalf of its own shareholders, tells a government, which represents 100% of the citizens in a given territory, to shove its legislation where the sun doesn’t shine. And not only is this not inherently absurd, but it also stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
They probably wouldn't have had to if the school system hadn't dropped language arts from most curriculums ages ago. Students now are getting a markedly shitter education and don't even know they're being fucked over.
It's by design, the politicians only need 28% to win, easier to scrape those votes off the bottom of the barrel of knowledge
That's pretty bold for a really fucking useless search engine. The EU could just block it and redirect google.com to a gov run searxng instange and everyone in europe would be better off overniggt
It would likely be impossible to redirect google.com without either sparking a cyberwar or building something like the great firewall of China, quite possibly both.
Blocking is somewhat possible, but to redirect, they would have to forge google certificates and possibly also fork Chrome and convince users to replace their browser, since last I checked, google hard-coded it's own public keys into Chrome.
Technical details
I say blocking in somewhat possible, because governments can usually just ask DNS providers to not resolve a domain or internet providers to block IPs.
The issue is, google runs one of the largest DNS services in the world, so what happens if google says no? The block would at best be partial, at worst it could cause instability in the DNS system itself.
What about blocking IPs? Well, google data centers run a good portion of the internet, likely including critical services. Companies use google services for important systems. Block google data centers and you will have outages that will make crowd-strike look like a tiny glitch and last for months.
Could we redirect the google DNS IPs to a different, EU controlled server? Yes, but such attempts has cause issues beyond the borders of the country attempting it in the past. It would at least require careful preparations.
As for forging certificates, EU does control multiple Certificate authorities. But forging a certificate breaks the cardinal rule for being a trusted CA. Such CA would likely be immediately distrusted by all browsers. And foreig governments couldn't ignore this either. After all, googles domains are not just used for search. Countless google services that need to remain secure could potentially be compromised by the forged certificate. In addition, as I mentioned, google added hard-coded checks into Chrome to prevent a forged certificate from working for it's domains.
Just block payments from advertisers by revoking their business licence.
Yes, I mentioned that in a comment deeper down. And even before that, just fine them. Chances are they will pay and if not, you can probably seize some bank accounts.
I am not trying to say Google can afford to completely defy the EU, just found it interesting how hard it is to block just google search specifically.
PS: Also mentioned in a burried comment, there actually is a way for ISPs to block google, since DNS over HTTPS is not enabled by default yet in browsers I think. I forgot this since I enabled encrypted DNS like 8+ years ago for myself and just assumed people also have it by now.
Nah. Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
This isn't like the great firewall of chine where you want to prevent absolutely all traffic. If you make it inconvenient to use, because CSS breaks or a js library doesn't load or images breaslk, its already a huge step into pushing it out of the market.
Enterprise market would be much harder, a loooot of EU companies rely on Google's services, platforms and apps, and migrating away would take a lot of time and money.
